20 Random Facts About Susan C A Macmillan-Finnigan
by Thanfiction
Summary: Another in the Daydverse Random Facts series: The Iron Angel of the DA. Contains spoilers for all three novels.


**1. She was not the first member of her family to go rebel.**

Actually, there was kind of a history of that sort of thing. The tree, as her father darkly phrased it, was "very heavily hung" with Hugenots and Jacobites, Irish Republicans, a handful of Welsh Nationalists, a Spanish Loyalist, and even a grandmother who had fought with the Maquis in the second Muggle World War, apparently because sitting in Portsmouth while it was being bombed flat was distinctly too boring. On the wizarding side of affairs, she'd lost all four grandparents (including _that_ one, much to her dismay), her father's brother and his entire family, and six assorted other cousins in the first war against Voldemort. Her aunt Amelia was a member of the Order of the Phoenix, and both her parents quite proudly aided and abetted. When they found out she was a member of the DA the first time around, her parents bought her the cauldron she was supposed to get for her seventeenth birthday a year early, saying that if she was old enough to stand up to a tyrant like that, she was grown witch enough for them.

**2. She had a younger brother she doesn't remember**.

His name, according to the little gravestone in the back yard, was Bradley, but she was only two years old when he was born, and he lived less than a week, never actually coming home from hospital. The nursery was converted back into a guest room within ten days of his death, and it became the thing the family Does Not Talk About. For the most part, she simply accepted it as children are wont to do, but after Ernie's death, she became obsessively terrified with the idea that whatever had killed her brother might be hereditary and take Cecily from her. Those desperate pleas finally broke through her mother's silence, and she discovered that he had a birth defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Though they promised her it wasn't hereditary and corrective procedures had since been developed, she still checked both Cecily's and Thomas' heartbeat several times a day throughout the latter stages of pregnancy.

**3. She may or may not be part Fae. **

There is absolutely no question that her grandmother Circe was a profoundly gifted and downright uncanny witch, whom Susan favors heavily. There is absolutely no question that she was strikingly beautiful, with darker hair and fairer skin and a far daintier build than the rest of her rather tanned, blonde, heavily Germanic-influenced family. There is absolutely no question that her great-grandmother passed every test for honesty and fidelity that they could come up with. There is absolutely no question that her great-grandfather was not, in fact, her great-grandfather. The family consensus on resolving these various points was that the poor sod had been cuckolded by a shapeshifting faerie, and indeed, young Circe did seem to pass several popular tests for such a child. There is still, on the other hand, a certain level of pragmatic suspicion placed on the next door neighbor, whom, it might be noted, was a rather dashingly lovely youth of prodigious magical gifts, black hair, a porcelain complexion...and who oddly vanished just two weeks before Circe was born.

**4. She wanted to be a veterinarian since she was three years old.**

Susan's bedroom was a perpetual menagerie of every ill and injured creature she could find or which found her through the network of playmates who learned quickly where you bring the hedgehog your puppy caught or the fox with the infected cut on its leg. The illusion of the pretty pink and white room with its lace bed curtains and Victorian furnishings was quickly broken when you opened a drawer, lifted a bedskirt, or pulled back a drapery to find literally dozens of cages, tanks, and shoeboxes, interspersed with stashes of bedding and food, gauze and homemade splints. No matter how many times her parents tried to clear it out, she always found a way around it, and by the time she was ten, they were actively supporting her genuine gifts, and not only had they arranged for her to apprentice with the local _real_ vet, a bookcase full of texts on animal anatomy and first aid had appeared.

**5. She was terrified of cutting her hair as a child.**

Somehow, she had gotten the impression that it would hurt terribly, and that she would probably bleed to death. No number of visits to the barber to watch other children get their hair cut could convince her otherwise, and her mother absolutely refused to just hold down the hysterically struggling, sobbing, begging little girl and do it by force. By the time she was five and had finally come to believe that no, it actually wouldn't be agony (after having to cut off a clump of it that had become just _hopelessly_ tangled around a flowered barrette), her hair was down past her waist and she was just in love with it. By the time she was twelve, it was halfway down her thighs and something of a signature. Though she will trim the ends when needed, she's never had a substantial haircut, and she is immensely - and rightfully - proud of the glorious, thick mane of pitch-black waves that kisses the backs of her knees, even if it does take about six hours a week to maintain healthily.

**6. She has been friends with Hannah Abbott since they were seven.**

A rather drastic plumbing failure resulted in a substantial remodel, and the family spent almost three weeks living at the Leaky Cauldron, where Susan almost immediately became fast friends with the innkeeper's outgoing granddaughter, especially when they realized they were going to be in the same year at Hogwarts when they got older. They were twice a week pen pals in between opportunities to visit Kent, London, or the South coast, and by the time they actually did not only end up in the same year but the same _House_, they were official best friends, and Hannah is her longest-lasting friendship by far. Although Susan did go through a brief crush on Hannah in third year, it has thankfully never impacted their friendship, and in fact, they have a half-joking standing agreement that if Hannah ever wants to experiment...

**7. She fell for Ernie when they saved a rabbit in second year.**

A rabbit's scream is a shockingly horrible thing, but when Mrs. Norris caught the ill-fated young kit mere feet away from the windows of the Great Hall, only two students abandoned breakfast and dashed for the doors. Up until that moment, Ernie had just been one of Those Two Boys Hannah's Always Hanging About With (and thus the source of a bitter jealousy and the assumption that he was an awful prat), but then she found out that he was from a farm full of animals that he had been caring for all his life, and that he simultaneously didn't begrudge the cat her instincts and was determined to save her intended snack. When puberty hit him like a herd of dragons and he wound up looking like a proper Highland Rogue off the cover of one of the romance novels she totally never ever read and certainly didn't have a stash of...well, that didn't hurt the crush one bit.

**8. She adores all things oh-so feminine.**

If it weren't for the disconcerting connotations with childhood (and the fact that she has enough trouble being seen as an adult when she's never quite managed to clear five feet or 100lbs without the help of heels or pregnancy), she'd happily go full Lolita, and as it is, she borrows quite a few style elements in her adult fashion sense. Although her parents did try to make it clear that she was more than welcome to wear trousers and play with dragons, Susan has always loved the theatricality of femininity in all its ruffles and roses, lace and satin, frills and fripperies, and they often had to argue her back when she was younger from confections of petticoats and pinafores and bows that frankly would have made her look like some sort of explosion in a baroque birthday cake. Almost everything she owned as a teenager that wasn't in school-mandated Hufflepuff colors was some shade of pink, and even in uniform, she insisted on lacy, beribboned underthings and the prettiest details she could get away with.

**9. She wasn't planning to date, much less fall in love that hard, much less get married at seventeen.**

Although she loved spending time with boys and the kind of dating that was a dinner here, an evening there, a trip to the theater now and then, she was kind of avoiding any deeper relationships. In part, it was because she knew how much time and devotion it would take to get the necessary MAGIs, but really, that was just an excuse. The truth of it was that she was also attracted to girls just as often and just as strongly as to boys, and everything she'd ever heard about "bisexual" insisted that it was just an excuse for "promiscuous" or a means of getting attention, so she was just trying to push through this "confused phase" and figure out if she was straight or a lesbian before she got herself in too deep with anyone. Then she watched Ernie get flogged, and it felt like her heart was being whipped to death with him, so surely that answered that, especially when it all felt so VERY from there, and to hell with it, why NOT just get married? _Will you regret choosing a man over your career or even choosing a man at all_ couldn't matter less if there wasn't going to BE a future beyond June. It was exciting and giddy and she threw herself into it headlong and heart-first because living a romance-novel fantasy almost, almost balanced out living a nightmare at the same time.

**10. She was definitely not planning on getting pregnant. **

In retrospect, it was the kind of stupid and naive that when you actually think about it, you never actually believed, you just assumed enough to _not_ think. Everything she'd ever been taught about safe sex had been focused so heavily on "until marriage" that there had been this vague idea that accidental pregnancy was just something that happened to Bad Girls who did it Before. Of course she knew a wedding ring wasn't contraception. But after everything that had happened not just that day but the past few months, when they were finally alone together, all she could think about was wanting him to rip the borrowed clothes off of her and fuck her so senseless that she couldn't remember what that basement smelled like or how dead already that little boy had felt in her arms. And then after that, they'd both kind of immediately found that this whole sex with someone you love and trust thing was extremely, extremely awesome, and there hadn't been a whole lot of consideration of anything until her normally stopwatch-regular period...wasn't.

**11. She started the DA Survivor's Fund just to help pick up the slack.**

It started with just paying for the deposit and first few month's rent and groceries for a flat for Wally and his family while they processed his Mum's disability. And then helping Sinead get cosmetic treatments for where the werewolf had torn her face open. And BSL lessons for Mandy. Then she realized that it wasn't just about a few incidentals slipping through the cracks, but that there was no net at all. The Ministry was not even remotely prepared for anything like the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, and that much was evident from the moment over 300 wounded arrived in a hospital with only 6 major trauma beds, stuffing the floors and corridors and necessitating utterly ruthless triage. It didn't get particularly better from there, and there was no infrastructure to deal with veterans and their needs, much less how many of them were minor children whose families had been further targeted by Death Eaters. Someone had to do something. She decided that someone was her.

**12. She has self-educated through two MAGI levels and fluency in Japanese.**

Juggling the first whirlwind stages of the Fund with a newborn daughter did not leave going back to formal school as an option, but nor was it an option to entirely fly blind. She bought books, sweet-talked her way into copies of syllibi, audited a class or two, and by the time Cecily was using complete sentences, she had taken and passed the exams for a MAGI in Wizarding Law, the first step to becoming a solicitor if she had so chosen. Instead, by the time Cecily had loose teeth, she had a second MAGI in Economics, with a NEWT in Abnormal Psychology focusing on PTSD. Her thesis paper was on the effects of repeated exposure to violence on adolescent development. Japanese, on the other hand, was something she taught herself because there was a language requirement on her MAGI, and she wanted to be able to order her favorite clothing directly from the real catalogs and designers, not the collections aimed at Western markets.

**13. She found the Seelie Court beneath the Loch and made a deal. **

The magic that protected Loch Cibeirdraoid had to come from somewhere, and she was owed enough favors by a certain young Unspeakable that she was very confident that it wasn't any magic known to wizard kind. That lead her to asking around the mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers of the Highland farm hands until she knew enough to have a very, very good guess of what exactly was keeping the shield of secrecy over the land, especially once she knew about the old ring of stones rumored to stand at the bottom of the lake. Susan had no greater fear than drowning - the cold, dark press of the water, being unable to breathe, being trapped - but she walked into the water without hesitating at the moment of twilight, a soapstone bowl of fresh cream with two of her daughter's baby teeth at the bottom in her hands, wearing all white with an iron ring in place of her wedding band and a crown of foxglove and bluebells woven in her hair. When she walked out again at dawn, there was a new edge to her smile and a small mark like a brand on her left foot. Beyond that, she'll tell no one, not even Seamus or Hannah.

**14. She was only supposed to stay at the Macmillans' until Cecily was born. **

Her parents' house had been burned to the ground by Death Eaters and they'd gone on the run, so of course in the immediate aftermath of the battle, she stayed with Ernie's family. Not that they were particularly inclined to let what they considered the most important uterus on the island out of their sight, but everyone just assumed that after Cecily was born, she'd be going back to Portsmouth, or at least England. The brutally rural environment was simply not the place for a pretty little thing such as herself, obviously. Except, that is, for the part where she took to the business of raising sheep and demiguise as if she'd been born to it for a hundred generations. The part where she insisted on implementing many of the modernizations Ernie had told her about wanting and improved the profitability of the operation by over 15% in two years. The part where she could walk the tors with Fiona with the baby on her hip all night during lambing season, then turn around on two hours sleep and pretty herself up to Apparate to Inverness and catch a portkey to London for an interview with the Prophet and an appointment at the Wizengamot before lunch. The part where she fell in love with the land _because_ it was hard and because she wanted Cecily to know her father whose spirit breathed in the wind through the heather.

**15. She has been twice voted the most powerful woman in wizarding politics. **

The first time, a lot of people tried to dismiss it because it was a poll in Witch Weekly. It was because she was beautiful, they said, and that had gotten her votes from envious housewitches. It was because she had a tragic love story, they said, and that had gotten her votes from sappy housewitches. It was because she had a cause that involved dashing young heroes, they said, and that had gotten her votes from plucky housewitches. They said all the things they used to dismiss her in person, and she didn't argue them. She smiled and shrugged and agreed that it was just a silly sort of a poll and let them continue to dismiss and underestimate and turn a blind eye. The second time, it was in the ICW Journal's Who's Who In Magical Politics, and she ranked number one among witches and number four overall. No one laughed that time...they just stared at each other in disbelief, compared notes, and realized they all, one way or another, were wrapped around her prettily pink-manicured fingers.

**16. She only slept with women between Ernie and Seamus. **

At first, she had decided that after having her heart broken that hard and winding up with a baby on top of everything else, she was just going to be a lesbian after all. Except she knew she couldn't handle the fund AND Cecily AND a relationship, nor - cowardly or not - did she want to deal with the political fallout of coming out, so she just snuck down to lesbian bars in Muggle cities every now and then and hooked up with something curvy and tanned and anonymous. It was in that environment that she began to understand what bisexual really meant, but she figured it didn't matter because she was effectively going to be single and effectively going to be lesbian for the rest of her life because the more she got into politics, the more her attitude resoundingly settled on fuck any man who wasn't DA in the very not fuck them sense. And the DA men...there just weren't any she felt could keep up with her, frankly, at least not who weren't already very taken. It was simple. Then she took in a convict and life got very complicated again.

**17. She has expanded on Rowan's training with Aikido, Muay Thai, and Krav Maga. **

Although she knows she has earned the respect of most of the farm hands, Susan is not in the least ignorant of the extraordinary sexism of that rural culture. Nor is she ignorant of exactly what an appealing target she made, especially before Seamus entered the picture. Tiny, beautiful, feminine, young, and wealthy, it would be too easy to get her alone and she knew that there were plenty of men around for whom there was no such thing as a no they couldn't decide really secretly somehow meant go for it. The DA had taught her a great deal, but it had been focused on a battle, not self-defense. Using Hermione as a contact with the Aurors, she chose martial arts that were known for brutal pragmatism and would help her use an attacker's size or weapons against them and end a situation quickly, effectively, and with no chance of "misunderstanding."

**18. She invested almost all of her inheritence. **

Ernie had given himself a modest allowance and invested the remainder with Justin's guidance, and she used that as a starting point, with absolutely no reservations about using everything from insider information to Divination to Legilimency to help it along from there. Although she had to make a few withdrawals of capital in the early stages of the fund, she's been not only living but running the fund entirely off of interest for over a decade, and for the last five years, even most of that has been re-invested. Only a very minimum is kept in wizarding currency - something she learned during that eventful Christmas break - with the rest distributed among accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. She's very close-lipped about the exact amount, but is more than willing to say that if it were to come down to it, there are resources enough for the DA to literally buy their own island. Or one of the world's smaller countries. They say all's fair in love and war, and for Susan, her work for the DA is a labor of both.

**19. She adopted Icarus' cat. **

Seamus asked about Riabh shortly after he first arrived, and it frankly shocked her, because after everything she'd read in his file, the last thing she'd expected was for him to express care about another living thing, much less something as small as his flatmate's cat. It took her a bit of effort to track down where he'd wound up, and by then, the shelter had him scheduled to be put down. She couldn't allow it, and though she fully intended to just keep him temporarily and find him a new home, it somehow didn't happen. She shouldn't have been surprised, and when she told her father, he pointed out that she had never been able to resist falling in love with abandoned animals. Fortunately for her, he never chose to remind her later of her retort that she was managing to resist Finnigan just fine.

**20. She still talks to Ernie.**

For the first two years, it was purely a tool to deal with grief, and her counselor said it was a perfectly normal one. She'd go up the hill every so often and talk to his grave, even though she had no real illusions that he could in any way hear her. Sometimes she'd tell him things she hated that he was missing, like how Tony and Cecily had taken their first fully independant steps on the same day. Sometimes she'd scream at him how she fucking hated him for leaving her alone in all this mess and in a way that she couldn't even dare complain in public without being called an ungrateful bitch because he was such a big damned hero. Sometimes she'd tell him how she woke up and reached for the empty pillow, or grabbed two mugs with the kettle, and was that crazy because they hadn't even been together long. It wasn't until Cecily was old enough to babble about "see Da!" that she began to wonder, and not until he appeared to Seamus that she was sure, but it didn't really make that much of a difference. Sometimes she wonders who she'd be if he'd lived, and she tells him that too, but most of the time any more, as hard as it's been and as hard as she knows it will continue to be, she thanks him for giving her the chance to find out who she's become without him, and deep down, she thinks he understands.


End file.
